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The Limited growing again 50 years after local founding

The Limited, a former trailblazer in specialty retailing, is growing again a half-century after its local founding

The Limited at 50

• The celebration begins today with a campaign to support Dress for Success, the nonprofit
organization that offers professional apparel and other support to women who are entering or
re-entering the workforce. Every customer who goes to a page on The Limited’s website —
http://thelimited.com/50th — and shares a success story, life lesson or
other story will prompt the retailer to donate $1 to Dress for Success, up to $50,000.

• As part of the celebration, The Limited plans to ask customers to go online and help select a
dress design that will be featured in its stores.

• The festivities will conclude in October with a commemorative event in all 259 stores.

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It was 50 years ago that an ambitious young Ohio State University graduate borrowed $5,000 from
his aunt and another $5,000 from a bank to open a store at the Kingsdale Shopping Center in Upper
Arlington.

That ambitious young man, Leslie H. Wexner, decided to call the store The Limited because he
intentionally limited its appeal to women.

With its opening, Wexner created the concept of specialty retailing, helped fuel the growth of
shopping malls and founded a retail empire that continues to thrive to this day.

To mark its half-century of business, The Limited is kicking off a four-month celebration today
in which the chain will be “reconnecting with the customer, reinforcing the brand,” said Tawn
Earnest, director of public relations and events. “We’re celebrating the client as star.”

The Limited is now a privately owned company separate from Wexner’s L Brands, the temporary name
of Limited Brands, parent of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.

Even so, “it’s pretty amazing, what The Limited has been throughout the years, its impact on the
retail environment, how it defined specialty retailers and made specialty retailers what they are
today,” said Nicolas Frechette, the chain’s senior vice president of merchandising.

Since private-equity group Sun Capital Partners took full ownership in 2010, The Limited has
added 68 stores, bringing the total to 259. Although the growth has been good, the number is a
considerable drop from the chain’s peak of 750 at the end of the ’80s.

“I think the (chain) currently is at a perfect size to really re-establish itself in the market,
to become a huge part of the retail market again,” Frechette said. “It’s smaller now and can really
be re-established to that woman by offering a collection of wear-to-work product, clothes that are
fashionable but easy to wear.

“What it was then, it still is now,” Frechette said. “It’s always been about bringing high
fashion to the American woman at affordable prices.”

That strategy is “on trend,” said Marcie Merriman, founder of PrimalGrowth, a retail- and
brand-strategy firm.

When recently departed CEO Linda Heasley was running the company, “she was always emphasizing
that The Limited should be the store that the customer would go to for that first suit, that first
interview suit,” Merriman said. “And I thought, ‘Who is wearing suits anymore?’ But more and more,
you’re seeing that in the workplace.”

Although officials at The Limited hope to include the chain’s founder in the celebration, as of
this writing, no firm plans had been made. Still, Wexner’s shadow looms large over his original
chain and, indeed, over retailing itself.

“There was a moment where The Limited was an integral part of the cultural zeitgeist in the
United States,” Earnest said. “At one point in the ’80s, The Limited was selling

200 million pieces of apparel a year — that’s three pieces of apparel for every woman in
America, ages 15 to 55. That’s the kind of legacy not every-body gets to celebrate.”

A big part of those sales came via the Forenza sweater, the iconic Shaker knit garment that was
a staple of stylish women during the 1980s and, by several accounts, the most-successful sweater in
U.S. retailing history, selling more than 3 million units at $29 apiece.

“In the late ’80s, it was the coolest place to shop, and it did have things for that age group —
young women just out of college,” Merriman said.

The driving force behind The Limited’s success was, of course, Wexner, who ultimately dubbed his
new parent company Limited Brands in 2002 to differentiate it from the original chain, and quickly
expanded the company portfolio through creation of companies such as Limited Express, Limited Too
and Bath & Body Works, as well as the acquisition of names such as Victoria’s Secret, Lane
Bryant, Henri Bendel and Abercrombie & Fitch.

“They established such a mythology, such a way of managing,” Frechette said. “It left a huge,
huge, huge mark on the market.”

But, as Wexner told
The Dispatch in an interview last year, while the original chain was important to him, “
life moves on.”

At some point, when The Limited was 10 or 15 years old, Wexner said, “someone said, ‘Your legacy
will be The Limited.’ And I thought, ‘If I'm defined by a brand, what a sad commentary about life.’
There’s more to life than that. What really matters is what you think about yourself in the here
and now. Are you proud of what you’re doing? You should be proud when you think about what you’ve
done for your community.”

During the final decade of the 20th century, “I think Limited Brands had different focuses,”
Frechette said. The Limited chain “was not their first focus at various points. Les was always
about the next new thing, the next trend, so when he opened other brands, maybe he did not put as
much focus on this (chain). But this brand has always been very relevant in the market.”

As a result of that change in focus, Limited Brands ultimately transferred 75 percent ownership
of The Limited chain in 2007 to Sun Capital Partners and sold the remaining shares to it in
2010.